"The Nun" is not your conventional film "Conjuring": EW review

The nun

We gave him a B

Through horror movies, certain types of people are universally terrifying. Clowns, for one. Victorian children for another. Every child sadly singing a nursery rhyme slowly. And now, thanks to the latest entry in the universe Conjuring, nuns. You will never be able to watch The sound of music in the same way again.

Ostensibly, The nun is a precursor of 2016 The Conjuring 2, in particular an original story of one of the most memorable fears of this film, a demonic nun with glowing eyes and a terrifying smile. The film begins two decades before the paranormal investigations of Ed and Lorraine Warren, in 1952, where a nun is discovered horribly hanged on the outside of a castle monastery isolated in an apparent suicide, and the Vatican investigates sending a priest (Demián Bichir) and a young religious novice, sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga, sister of Conjuringreverse star Vera Farmiga, although no explicit connection is established between the two characters).

The young French-speaking Canadian (Jonas Bloquet) who lives inexplicably in Romania and who discovered the first suicide of the first nun, helped them in their quest for more and more macabre. Bloquet looks a bit like Brendan Fraser, an effect helped by his garter belt over a white shirt and by the torch of much of the movie, but it's not the only reason The nun feels a bit like 1999 The Mummy. When the third act goes down on a quest to use the blood of Jesus Christ to seal a portal to hell (yes), it becomes much closer to Fraser crossing the Egyptian tombs than anything Tom Cruise did in 2017.

Unlike the first two Conjuring movies that exist in the ether and anticipation, The nun is distinctly tangible movie. The best understanding of corporeality is that of a scene in which a character crosses the woods when – the jumps of fear! – a hanging leg of a nun hanging appears in front of him. The corpse falls, his face turns into a bloody smile. The body roars like an animal and tries to bite his face. Scary? Sure. But such a distinctly different scary than the grotesque horror of seeing a dead body barefoot a few inches from your face as the juxtaposition feels uncomfortable.

A screenplay by Gary Dauberman (he) jerks awkwardly between the laconic thriller and the campy comedy. Looking at The Nun, it is possible to consider several versions of this film: a slow-burning Gothic thriller; bloody blood-horror; action-comedy – superimposed like transparencies stacked on an overhead projector. Like the demon Valak, we never really have the opportunity to see the true form of this film, whatever shape it chooses to take in a given scene.

For those whose priority is the heart rate, do not worry: there are two or three jump attacks where your devoted critic is afraid of having broken the hand of the person sitting next to her. The last two thirds of the film provide a series of fears, one after the other. Nothing stands out as unique or memorable (the piece of non-in-the-mirror, scary as it was, was already done in The Conjuring 2). But when he leans in his camp (that is, when French Canadian French is on the screen), The nun is closest to its ideal form of midnight movie, the youngest cousin of Conjuring movies with less accumulation but more shots that you will see in a theater. B